Portraying an eccentric Austrian artist in the new musical “The Blue Flower” at Second Stage Theater, Marc Kudisch performs the challenging feat of singing several snatches of song in a made-up language created by his character, Max. It’s called Maxperanto, and it’s incomprehensible, naturally, although the talented Mr. Kudisch sings it with the same expressive gusto he brings to the rest of his performance. Unfortunately these moments of sweetly sung gibberish are not the only ones in this high-minded muddle of a musical that may leave you scratching your head.

Although it’s easy to admire the ambition behind this historically inspired show set in a turbulent 20th-century Europe, the musical’s authors, Jim Bauer and Ruth Bauer, have stuffed “The Blue Flower” with so much incident that we never quite get our bearings. Even as it races across the map of Europe, from Berlin to Paris to Zurich and back to Berlin — leaping the Atlantic for a bizarre pit stop in Texas at one point — the show feels curiously static and uninvolving.

Based loosely on the lives of four notable figures — the painters Max Beckmann and Franz Marc, the Dada artist Hannah Hoch and the pioneering scientist Marie Curie — “The Blue Flower,” directed by Will Pomerantz, takes enough liberties that the characters in the show only share the first names of their real-life counterparts. In trying to explore how the tumult of the First World War and its aftermath disrupted or destroyed the lives of a generation of artists and thinkers, the authors invent relationships among the characters that depart from the histories of the people that inspired them. (Marie Curie is called Maria here, and Curie’s husband Pierre never shows up, for example.)

Perhaps the musical’s primary problem is a surfeit of narration. While the eight cast members take turns describing the spiraling, complicated stories of the central foursome’s lives, they almost never stop and talk to one another, resulting in a musical that tells us a lot more than it shows us. (To make up for the lecturing, Chase Brock’s choreography has the cast crawling or caroming all over the stage at an often frenzied pace.)

And boy, does this musical have a lot to tell. The show opens with Max poring over a scrapbook in which he has composed a fairy-tale version of his life under the title “The Blue Flower.” (The image is an oft-used symbol in German art and mythology; fans of the Penelope Fitzgerald novel will probably have figured out by now that the musical bears no relation.) With a mysterious narrator names Mr. O (Graham Rowat) along to help, we are told of Max’s history as a gifted art student in Berlin, where he meets Franz (Sebastian Arcelus), a fellow painter with an affection for horses and a concomitant obsession with the American West.

Relocating to Paris, they meet the determined science student Maria, who describes herself as being “as passionate about the pleasures of the flesh as the mysteries of the mind.” Although Max first develops a crush on her, it is Franz she falls for, sending Max into a funk that more or less lasts through the musical. (Kudos to Mr. Kudisch, a Broadway veteran with three Tony nominations to his name, for finding a variety of shades in Max’s permanent gloom.)

Photo

Meghan McGeary, left, and Marc Kudisch, front, in the Second Stage Theater production of “The Blue Flower."Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

When war breaks out, Max joins up as a medical orderly who is also recruited to provide journals from the front lines for the newspapers. With his love of horses, Franz joins the cavalry. Maria is bereft and blames Max for allowing her lover to put himself in danger. Still, she has her test tubes, and Maria and Franz’s separation inspires one of the finest songs in Mr. Bauer’s score, an epistolary duet in which they keep their love alive by exchanging intimate literary caresses.

Mr. Bauer’s music throughout “The Blue Flower” is accomplished, underscoring the darkling mood of the story in the somber ballads while also revving up for more romping numbers like the mock-Dada performance during which Max first meets Hannah (Meghan McGeary). The score is orchestrated by Mr. Bauer for a curious but surprisingly cohesive blend of instruments: piano, cello and bassoon but also plenty of guitars, including steel guitar. There are hints of Kurt Weill and German music of the Weimar era in the music, but several songs are flavored with the distinctive twang of American country music. (I could easily imagine a couple of the ballads being recorded by the country-pop group Lady Antebellum.)

And yet, despite the beauty of their music, Mr. Bauer’s songs rarely move the story forward — or in any direction — and his lyrics tend to dissolve into imagistic raptures that leave us grasping for their intended meaning. A sample chorus from a duet for Max and Hannah:

Eyes and bones

Silhouettes: a rosy spire

Teeth and foam

Statuettes: a silent choir

Meanwhile the book, abetted by elaborate video projections using archival footage, keeps shoveling both fictional and actual history at us. There’s a long digression about the Hapsburg prince Rudolf, whose suicide led to his cousin Ferdinand eventually inheriting the reins of the empire. Most of us know what happened to Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, and of the ensuing carnage, but “The Blue Flower” tells us all about it anyway.

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The musical’s ambition is to illuminate the ways in which the forces of history, and specifically the chaotic destruction of an annihilating world war, affect the lives of artists and other visionaries, and art itself. But the Bauers — he is a composer and she is an artist — fail to bring glorious theatrical life to their ambitious enterprise.

Although the cast of “The Blue Flower” is first rate — Teal Wicks, as Maria, sings with an expressiveness and richness of tone that enchants — we never fully enter into the experience of the characters: not the aesthetic impulses that drive them, not the sexual and emotional attractions that bind them together, not the brutal circumstances that drive them apart. They remain as remote and two-dimensional as figures from the pages of an encyclopedia.